Some people were not surprised that with those cooks in the kitchen, the resultant menu included the Iraq war.

(Another member of the board at the time, Kenneth Adelman, was the author in 2002 of a Washington Post OpEd predicting that liberating Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” He startled many in 2008 when he endorsed Obama.)</p)

That didn’t kill the board — in fact Gates expanded it Wednesday, adding several new seats to the big table.

But the invite list changed substantially. Gingrich is notably absent, though Gates did keep a few old cold warriors — mostly those associated with the “realist” school of policy: Henry Kissinger, former SecDef William Perry (of Stanford University), current chairman John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and another former secretary of defense, James Schlesinger.

Two familiar new names are Richard Danzig and Chuck Hagel, each of whom were seen as strong candidates for Obama’s Sec Def (and who are seen by many as candidates to take over from Gates if he doesn’t stick around).

crunchers, and academics. They are much more likely to be found in Foreign Affairs than in Us Weekly. And their area of study, in whole or in part, is the same: counterinsurgency.

What I imagine the Defense Policy Board meetings look like. Or should.

Biddle and Krepinevich have each written about the need to shift the military’s budget and structure off of a Cold War model to meet new threats from irregular warfare. Nagl, then still in the military, co-wrote (with Gen. David Petraeus) the military’s new counterinsurgency field manual; Sewall wrote the introduction to the civilian edition. Kaplan, a journalist (of all things!) reviewed it for Slate.

Edit: I join the long list of people who have mixed up Fred and Robert Kaplan, who are unrelated. Fred Kaplan wrote the Slate review. Robert Kaplan wrote (among other things) “Imperial Grunts.” Sorry about the mix-up.

(Extra points: Kaplan still writes for the Atlantic Monthly but also is a senior fellow at CNAS. Nagl is CNAS President, a gig he landed after founding President Michelle Flournoy left the think tank to become Under Secretary for Defense for Policy in February. These are not coincidences.)

Also of interest is Robert Gallucci, dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an expert in WMD control. Gates is an unabashed booster of the State Department and the Foreign Service who has turned heads by repeatedly calling for the State Department — the DoD’s traditional rival — to get a bigger budget. (There are more people serving in military bands, he is fond of noting, than there are Foreign Service officers.)

A core of old Cold Warriors steeped in Mutually Assured Destruction and detente surrounded by young Turks chatting about cyberwarfare and public diplomacy — that’s the panel Gates has formed to advise him and the military on future policy.

Sounds like the SecDef is expecting any future wars to look more like Iraq and Afghanistan than World War II and the Cold War — but is hedging his bets by keeping some institutional memory on board.